Many-body corrections to charged-current neutrino absorption rates in nuclear matter

Abstract

Including nucleon-nucleon correlations due to both Fermi statistics and nuclear forces, we have developed a general formalism for calculating the charged-current neutrino-nucleon absorption rates in nuclear matter. We find that at one-half the nuclear density many-body effects alone suppress the rates by a factor of 2 and that the suppression factors increase to $\ensuremath{\sim}5$ at $4\ifmmode\times\else\texttimes\fi{}{10}^{14} {\mathrm{g}\mathrm{}\mathrm{}\mathrm{}\mathrm{cm}}^{\ensuremath{-}3}.$ The associated increase in the neutrino-matter mean free paths parallels what we have found for neutral-current interactions and may open up interesting possibilities in the context of the delayed supernova mechanism and protoneutron star cooling.